Not wearing a watch much nowadays, but I’m acutely aware of time through the tides, which are more ingrained in my daily activities than ever before, and certainly more so than when I lived in landlocked Niger and Mali, where there’s also plenty of sand, but a bigger payoff here where the sand comes with water. And beaches.

Not long after being here I realized that, like some kind of mariner, I had internalized the tides and had an uncanny, almanac-like prescience of the two times a day that it’s low tide. During the first lockdowns of the pandemic, beaches were closed altogether in Costa Rica. When they started lifting the restrictions , even though the beaches were open for 12 hours per week, that still meant the beach was off-limits to me a few days every other week, because it’s not safe to go in or walk at high tide. At high tide the beach meets an embankment and there’s tons and tons of tree trunk-sized driftwood is crashing into the beachhead, threatening to break your ankles or pull you under altogether, which might sound exaggerated but I’ve had first person accounts of both, so I only get on the beach at low tide.

Since I recognized my nascent old (wo)man of the seas tendencies, I’ve had tides on my mind. Not just debut album of the one time it girl, Fiona Apple. It sparked thinking about cliches related to tides, and I thought of an expression that is on frequent rotation on the capitalist playlist “A rising tide lifts all boats.” So that is obliquely what will be explored in this post. In mulling it over in the context of our current times, when the tide is going out not coming in, I also thought of ships being grounded or in distress. And contrary to the old law of the sea, when boats are in trouble, it’s not always women and children first. On the contrary.

Without surrendering my dyed-in-the-wool capitalist bone fides, I submit that a rising tide litfing all boats is a trite euphemism for trickle-down, “voodoo” economics, a staple of the old fiscally conservative GOP playbook (even though I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that it was JFK who introduced the saying into the lexicon). Also straight out of the World According to Wikipedia, it means “…economic policy, particularly government economic policy, should therefore focus on broad economic efforts.” But by focusing on GDP growth with out driling down to disaggregate by actors in the economy, we lose sight of some glaring inequalities.

Not all boats are built the same. Some are weighted down by heavy anchors, like generations of pervasive economic inequality. Some are rickety and can barely stay afloat, even in calm seas. And irrespective of tides, a boat can be more buoyant when a man is at the helm. Because if a woman’s captaining the ship, she’s most likely getting paid less than a man to do it.

We recently celebrated Black Women Equal Pay Day, a trimester later than Women’s Equal Pay day in the Spring, which is another trimester past men’s earnings. Fun fact: another trimester and we could make a baby, y’all! A baby that a single mom can’t afford to raise but would be stigmatized for availing herself of pitiful social safety net that is inadequate but may be the Plan C that she was left with given that access to family planning is getting harder and harder to come by.

Holly Corbertt in Forbes tells us “Parental status also impacts the wage gap, with Black mothers making just 50 cents to every dollar a white father makes… The pandemic and social unrest about racial injustice have amplified existing inequities in America. ‘Caregiving duties are falling on women across the board, and Black women are more likely to be family breadwinners and also single mothers,’ says Chandra Thomas Whitfield, journalist and podcast host of In The Gap”

Rising tides don’t lift boats that are in a lock system, where men are getting the highest wages, and women are behind the gates and sluices that keep them below, and black women and single moms are trailing even further behind.

I’m horrified by our congress that is acting like survivors on a lifeboat that will be swamped if we provide more assistance. We can’t wait for the tide to come back in, we need to start distributing life vests (extending unemployment benefits) and making more room in the lifeboats (small business stimulus). Shame on them. Shame on us for letting them get away with it.

The point here is that while we capitalists are all patting ourselves on the back for letting the invisible hand of markets have free reign, the incongruous growth in equity markets is doing nothing for the most vulnerable, many of whom are in essential jobs, at risk so that we can keep our pantries stocked and the garbage cans emptied, and living paycheck to paycheck in the best of times…